Every year I look forward to the holidays, not just because of the delicious foods, blinkenlights and the giving (and receiving) of gifts, but also for the Anime Secret Santa Project, a really cool collective anime reviewing project thingie organized every year since 2009 by the Reverse Thieves. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to participate each year, and have enjoyed it every year, and thanks to Secret Santa, have found quite a few really good anime titles that I hadn’t considered before. And, every year, in spite of my extremely unpredictable work schedule combined with my legendary penchant for procrastination, I have always managed to get my review posted by the Christmas Day deadline, even if only just barely.

Until this year, that is.

Unfortunately, I am unable to get my review posted on time this year due to several things. For one thing, my work schedule has been incredibly busy starting right around Thanksgiving, and straight on through Christmas; usually it’s the exact opposite. Second, for some inexplicable reason, every relative on the planet decided “Gee, maybe this would be a good year to drop in on the California branch of the family!” In the past two weeks I’ve met branches of the family that I didn’t even know existed. Finally, despite my best efforts, I managed to catch one of the many seasonal cold bugs that are making the rounds, and that had me out of commission for a couple of days.

Anyway, I have told everyone involved in no uncertain terms that I will be taking the week between Christmas and New Years’ off, not just because I need the time to finish various things (such as Anime Secret Santa) but also for my own sanity. And as soon as I can tear myself away from The Family, I’ll work on finishing Secret Santa, and hope to have it posted soon. So stay tuned! And, again, my apologies. (bows his head in shame)

(ps: In case you were asking yourself “Well then, how did you manage to find the time to come up with a 12 Days of Kurisumasu pick each and every day, and more or less on time even?!” Well, after last year’s difficulties in getting entries posted every day, I wanted to find a way to post them automatically. Thankfully someone wrote a WordPress plugin that lets you automatically show/hide text on a given day, and using that, combined with a service that lets me schedule Twitter and Facebook posts to automatically post at a future date/time, I was able to write up all 12 Days entries ahead of time and have them automatically post. Sadly, this sort of automation can’t help me with Secret Santa; the level of AI technology hasn’t yet progressed to the point where an automated assistant can help me finish writing my Secret Santa review… someday maybe… sigh)